from the adapt-or-die dept

For several years now we've noted how instead of adapting to the cord cutting age, many in the cable and broadcast industry have responded with the not-so-ingenious approach of aggressive denial, raising rates as fast as humanly possible, and stuffing even more ads into every television hour. And when broadcasters can't get the ads to fit, they'll just resort to speeding up or editing programs to ensure that they're hammering paying customers with more ads than ever. Given the rise in alternative viewing options, this obviously isn't the most ingenious form of market adaptation.

But in a sign that somebody over at the Comcast NBC Universal media empire is at least making a fleeting attempt at sector evolution, the company has announced that it will be dramatically reducing ad loads in some programs. More specifically, the company says it will be reducing the advertising load in each episode of "Saturday Night Live" by around 30%:

"NBC's "Saturday Night Live" is paring down its commercial load, with plans to cut about 30% of ads out of the sketch comedy show next season. It will do this by removing two commercial breaks per episode, giving viewers more content, said Linda Yaccarino, chairman-advertising sales and client partnerships, NBC Universal."

The catch? The company's going to be experimenting with more native, sponsored, and product placement advertising as part of the attempt to combat cord cutting and ad-skipping simultaneously:

"And for advertisers, NBC will also be offering a limited opportunity to partner with "SNL" to create original branded content. These native pods will only occur six times a year, Ms. Yaccarino said. "As the decades have gone by, commercial time has grown," Lorne Michaels, creator and executive producer, "Saturday Night Live," said in a statement. "This will give time back to the show and make it easier to watch the show live."

While it's not entirely clear what these "native pods" will exactly look like, it's not so much an evolution in advertising as it is a return to the bygone era of fifties TV sponsored product placement:

This isn't NBC's first flirtation with making a 180 industry turn back to content of this type, and the company has previously stated that advertisers can pay $300,000 or more just to get their feet in the door with product placement and native ads. And while quality and humor are certainly subjective, the problem is NBC's past experiments on this front really aren't that funny, and occasionally stumble into what feels like desperation. That opens the door to damaging your brand if your attempt to pitch laundry detergent or pharmaceuticals during a sketch is too ham-fisted.

NBC and advertisers are responding to the fact that prime time ratings and traditional cable TV subscribers continue to drop. Nielsen (the same company that used to call cord cutting "purely fiction") notes that most broadcasters continued to see up to a 4.1% decline in the number of homes tuning in to traditional television last month. That's again thanks to both cord cutting and "cord trimming," or the act of cutting back on the number of channels or premium networks a users subscribes to -- both in turn a response to high prices, restrictive viewing options, and flagging quality.

And while creatively experimenting with how ads get delivered is certainly part of the solution, it's not going to be a substitute for the one thing broadcasters (and by proxy cable companies) have been totally unwilling to do: offer the same content at a lower price. Ultimately the sector's going to have to take it on the chin, lose significantly more money, and begin seriously competing on channel bundle flexibility and price. That's an utterly unappealing proposition for an industry used to raising prices at four-times the rate of inflation, but the alternative is letting pesky, innovative upstarts walk away with legions of younger, disenfranchised television viewers.

from the but-the-rest-of-the-internet-can dept

Ah, stupid copyright licensing rules block perfectly normal activities yet again. This past weekend, Saturday Night Live ran a mildly amusing skit involving a power outage at internet streaming radio company, Pandora, in which an intern -- played by Bruno Mars -- has to step in and sing a variety of songs to keep the streams running. It's a slightly hacky trick to show off Mars' singing mimicry, but done pretty well. While NBC has had a somewhat ridiculous love/hate affair with putting SNL clips online. Over the past few years, it's finally realized that viral clips are an important promotional vehicle for the show. Yet... this clip is not online on NBC.com or Hulu, where SNL normally puts its clips... because (of course) music licensing online makes it an impossibility. The TV shows have licenses for TV broadcast, but they don't apply to internet streams (which is why you see some shows change out their music on Hulu). Yet, here, the clip doesn't work at all without the actual music.

Of course, this is the internet, so the clip was quickly uploaded all over the place, and while some of those sources have already seen it pulled down, others still seem to have it up. At the time of this posting, eBaum's World appears to have a working copy.

Of course, having now seen it, it would seem like there's a pretty strong parody defense claim if anyone argued they were infringing. Mars parodies many of the songs, changing or garbling the lyrics, which is a big part of the joke. But, of course, that would require NBC Universal to actually have the guts to fight in court for fair use -- and even just thinking that I think I heard some laughter coming from Rick Cotton's offices.

The end result, though, is nothing but stupidity. NBC doesn't get to show the clip more widely and get the promotional benefits. It also doesn't get the ad revenue that would have gone alongside its own hosted clips. Instead, other sites get the attention and the traffic.

from the right-hand,-left-hand dept

Danny Sullivan has an amusing blog post about his attempt to track down a Saturday Night Live skit that he wanted to watch online. Given how key the online audience has been to SNL over the past five years, you would think that, by now, NBCUniversal would have this process down cold, and would have all the skits easy to access and ready to go. Instead... for whatever reason, it doesn't have this particular skit that Sullivan wanted ("Downton Abbey Meets Spike TV"). He checked the official SNL page. No luck. He checked Hulu. No luck. Then he went digging... and he found lots of unauthorized versions, including in two unlikely places. One was on Time's website -- which is owned by Time Warner, a major media competitor to NBCUniversal. Time Warner also was a backer of SOPA/PIPA. Perhaps it should be careful about posting unauthorized versions of competitors' TV shows on its own site...

But, even more interesting? Sullivan found an unauthorized copy at iVillage -- a site owned by NBCUniversal:

Yup. That embed at the bottom? Unauthorized version uploaded to YouTube. Posted on an NBCUniversal site... because NBCUniversal won't post it itself.

from the nice-one-sherm dept

Former Las Vegas Journal Review publisher and Stephens Media CEO Sherman Frederick was the main champion behind Righthaven. Early on he was the one who explained (in bizarre, nonsensical terms) why the LVRJ was funding and supporting Righthaven, and mocked those who pointed out the ridiculousness of his position. Part of his reasoning was that putting copyright infringing content on your website or blog is absolutely no different than stealing the Corvette out of his driveway. Even if we ignore how this is completely wrong (someone copying content doesn't remove that content from his site, and he still has the content, etc.) and grant him that premise, it seems rather odd that Frederick himself has now been caught posting infringing material to his own blog.

Now, it's probably worth mentioning that poor Mr. Frederick lost his job right after the election, but he's still a columnist for the LVRJ. One of our readers, Joseph, pointed out that one of Mr. Frederick's recent blog posts was a short one about how Saturday Night Live had done a skit about the TSA patdowns, and he embedded it in his blog post. Except, he apparently chose an infringing one from YouTube, rather than the legit version from Hulu. Oops. NBC has taken down that video, so now Frederick's blog post simply shows this:

In case you can't see it, the video box says: "This video contains content from NBC Universal, who has blocked it on copyright grounds." Of course, note that NBC Universal chose to just take the content down -- something that Righthaven never gives anyone the opportunity to do. But, more importantly, I'm wondering if Mr. Frederick can explain why he stole NBC's Corvette?

Honestly, the claims of copying seem a bit overblown. While both are called "Tiny Hats" and both do involve characters wearing a tiny hat, that's about as far as the similarities go. The overall concepts beyond that are pretty different. However, apparently, it's created a big stink online, with the comedians behind the Adult Swim version "calling out" SNL. However, they don't seem to have any interest in going legal (not that they could) and later admitted that inspiration comes from all over:

He says he's not particularly angry, and thinks it could have just been coincidence, as Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, and Andy Samberg, among other "SNL" cast members, have appeared on "Adult Swim."

"We understand that we've created something that a lot of people in comedy watch and like, and influences are totally fine," he says. "We draw influences from people all the time."

He goes on, "I don't want to start a big thing here. But it'll be interesting to see what the web does with this."

And, indeed, that last line is the key: there are social costs if what you're doing is seen as being too close. However, I'll let you be the judge of whether or not theseskits are too close (and, um, whether or not either one is actually funny):